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NBC News reports on how microbiologist Gerry Quinn 'followed up on some folklore his family had passed on to him.' Old timers insisted that the dirt in the vicinity of a nearly 1,500-year-old church in County Fermanagh in Northern Ireland, an area once occupied by the...

An anonymous reader quotes the Associated Press: Most states ban texting behind the wheel, but a legislative proposal could make Nevada one of the first states to allow police to use a contentious technology to find out if a person was using a cellphone during a car crash... ...

Google+ 'was an Internet-based social network. It was almost 8 years old,' reports KilledByGoogle.com, which bills itself as 'The Google Graveyard: A list of dead products Google has killed and laid to rest in the Google Cemetery.' But before Google+ closes for good in...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from public news station KNPR about how close weare flying taxi services: The dream of flying cars is as at least as old as the automobile itself. Bell, which makes attack helicopters for the U.S. Navy, is working on this new project with...

In Texas the local car dealer lobby has blocked Tesla from selling its cars directly to customers. They're using old laws meant to prevent car manufacturers from competing with their own local dealers -- but Tesla never had any local dealers! And according to Electrek, it...

To avoid copyright claims, 'YouTube creators and Twitch streamers have been performing terrible a capella covers of popular songs,' reports the Verge: React videos are a huge part of YouTube's current culture; people lift popular movie trailers and film their reactions to...

The Huffington Post ran a bombshell report this week on one of a handful of people who have 'figured out how to manipulate Wikipedia's supposedly neutral system to turn a profit.' They're describing Ed Sussman, a former head of digital for Fast Company and Inc.com who's now...

'In the cloud wars, Microsoft has been able to win big business from retailers, largely because companies like Walmart, Kroger, Gap and Target are opting not to write big checks to rival Amazon,' reports CNBC: The more Amazon grows, the more that calculation could start...

'Scientists are hoping to unlock some of the universe's mysteries through 50-year-old moon rocks,' reports the New York Daily News -- specifically, three samples that spent that half century sealed in airtight canisters. One Apollo 18 sample from 1972 contains 1.8 pounds of...

An anonymous reader quotes Engadget: Researchers from Stanford University's School of Medicine presented results from a giant study sponsored by Apple Inc. that showed the Apple Watch can sometimes spot patients with undiagnosed heart-rhythm problems, without producing large ...

Long-time Slashdot reader skdffff quotes ZDnet: F5 Networks on Monday announced that it will acquire NGINX, which provides popular open-source software of the same name, for $670 million. The deal advances F5's aim of capitalizing on the trend toward multi-cloud deployments. ...

Stephen O'Grady, co-founder of the industry analyst firm RedMonk, asks whether open source vendors are marching towards an inevitable and damaging war with big cloud providers: In the last twelve to eighteen months...a switch has been flipped. Companies have gone from...

CNBC reports Dungeons and Dragons 'has found something its early fans never expected: Popularity.' The days of hiding away in a basement rolling dice and playing 'Dungeons and Dragons' in darkness is over. More than 40 years after the first edition of 'Dungeons and Dragons'...

Five candidates now are running to be Debian's project leader for the coming year. But earlier this week, Slashdot reader Seven Spirals shared LWN's story about what a difficult election it's been: This year, the call for nominations was duly sent out by project secretary...

Medium's technology publication ran a 3,600-word investigation into a mystery that began when a 66-year-old New York woman Googled directions to her neighborhood, 'and found that the app had changed the name of her community...' It's just as well no one contacted Google,...

'Last month it was discovered that WinRAR, software used to open.zip archive files, has been vulnerable for the last 19 years to a bug that's easily exploited by hackers and malware distributors,' writes SlashGear. Slashdot reader Iwastheone quotes their report: Check Point, ...

Munky101 tipped us off to some interesting comments from New York's activist congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. TechCrunch reports: It's impossible to discuss the seismic shift toward automation without a conversation about job loss. Opponents of these technologies...

What caused a devastating five-day blackout in Venezuela? Two engineers with expertise in geospatial technologies believe the answer lies in images from a NASA weather satellite showing thermal activity, which they superimposed onto Google Earth, the AP reports: Within hours ...